Purification Time
Matriarchy versus Patriarchy (4)
After I returned to England, I hired a private detective, an ex-cop, to investigate the Cathars, the Pure Ones.
I won’t go into all the details here because it’s a long story that took place over several years.
Its relevance is that it is an example of the Shadow Religion of the Patriarchy – the religion of a thousand names – in action. This is what it does, how well it hides itself, and how difficult it is to bring to justice, if not impossible.
But I had to try, because the Muse, the driving force of the Matriarchy, had ordered me to and she gave me no peace until I obeyed.
We started with a newspaper advert, enquiring if anyone remembered The Old Curiosity Shop. Replies to a box number. I suggested the idea to the private detective because it had worked on a famous American case of Catholic child abuse involving the infamous Father James Porter and the man who brought him to justice, Frank Fitzpatrick.
The Father Porter case is an important and major news story about the validity of recovered memories, which is completely suppressed in the British media, notably by The Guardian. Google it and you’ll see what I mean. It just doesn’t exist in the UK press. The Guardian really don’t want people to know the truth, because even today, they still – still! – promote False Memory. Even though the semi-criminal False Memory organisations have long been discredited and shut down.
Why The Guardian should suppress the story is obvious – its masters have ordered them to.
The reason why the Guardian’s masters should do this does not bear thinking about.
Frank Fitzpatrick was actually a private detective, too.
Like myself, he was an altar boy and in mid-life he began to have similar recovered memories of being abused by a Catholic priest. Because he was a private detective, he had the necessary skills to do something about it.
It’s a great story, as you can imagine. In fact I offered a fictional version of it to that hard-hitting, courageous, cutting edge of comics Vertigo. An editor there told me they really wanted ‘hard-hitting and daring stories of modern life’. Needless to say they weren’t interested. It was too daring for Vertigo.
Fitzpatrick tracked down a serial child abuser, Father James Porter. He put an advert in a relevant newspaper asking, ‘Does anyone remember Father James Porter?’ He received numerous replies from Survivors confirming Porter was an abuser. With their evidence endorsing his own recovered memories, and Porter’s own admission of guilt, he had the bastard banged up for the rest of his miserable life.
But a newspaper advert didn’t work for us.
We only received two replies, which weren’t relevant. Ipswich people know how to keep their mouths shut.
So we had to think again.
Instead, this burly ex-cop paid a visit to the Pure Ones and told them he was acting as a ‘researcher’ for an anonymous Ipswich author who was gathering information for a book of his memoirs about growing up in Ipswich.
This anonymous author remembered the Old Curiosity Ship from his boyhood, just by the public library that had fed his creativity, and wanted to know more about it.
The Cathars were helpful at first, talking about the Old Curiosity Shop and offering a brochure about its famous history.
The next day they changed their minds and withdrew the offer.
They continued to pretend that they believed him and his story of researching a story about yesteryear Ipswich for an anonymous author.
Even though this cover story was so obviously complete and utter bollocks.
But talking about ‘memoirs’ meant that everyone could have a coded conversation about why a detective was really knocking on doors and asking a lot of strange questions and still make out it was completely innocent.
I had the strong feeling I wasn’t the first Survivor to knock on the Cathars’ doors wanting to ‘discuss’ their childhood with them.
So one thing led to another and the detective turned up on the front doorstep of the long-retired manager of the Old Curiosity Shop.
He quickly stepped out of his front door, closed it behind him, and asked nervously, ‘What’s this all about?’
He denied all knowledge of anything, of course. But his twitchy behaviour certainly convinced the detective that he had something to hide.
Later, I invited the manager to meet me in his local pub to ‘discuss’ the past.
By now, we had dropped the pretence that this was about writing a cosy book about the good old days in Ipswich, dribbling with more nostalgia than Ridley Scott’s Hovis advert.
The gloves were off.
I suggested to him we could have ‘a bit of a chat’ about the past.
Understandably, he declined.
He later wrote to me and the private detective to the effect that, ‘It wouldn’t be fair to past clients of the Old Curiosity Shop to talk about the past.’ And that was his final word on the subject.
Hmm.
Well, I’m pretty certain he would have looked over his shoulder for several years and that was reasonably satisfying.
The detective was brilliant. He suggested we both go together to the police and I make a formal complaint about the Cathars.
But my recovered memories were fragmentary and The Guardian’s fierce campaign to discredit and dismiss memories of abuse as ‘false memories’ – with a British False Memory Society member constantly writing for them – was seriously on my mind.
You must remember, twenty years ago, people still believed The Guardian stood for the truth. Doubtless there are a few social workers and teachers who still believe it, even today.
I didn’t know how much I’d suppressed out of fear and how much the Pure Ones had suppressed with hypnosis or drugs, which are in every predator’s tool kit and most definitely were in theirs. So I can still see, right now, the crumpled Timothy White's chemist bag on the side of a bed with God know what inside. Once again, it’s only a snapshot of memory. Infuriatingly, it doesn’t add up to a narrative.
So I declined the detective’s kind offer.
If it was today, even with my fragmentary memories, I’d probably go for it. Because I’ve subsequently nailed another abuser with a similar incomplete narrative, as I relate in my book, Pageturners.
The Muse does not believe in forgiveness.
I’m still impressed by that detective. And you know what? He never charged, never sent me an invoice, for his considerable and time-consuming services.
He was a hero.
But it wasn’t just the annoying fragments of my memories and The Guardian’s campaign against Survivors with recovered memories that stopped me.
I was using them both as an excuse not to take action.
The real reason was I was terrified.
Today, I would face other secret practitioners of the Shadow Religion, like the Catholic Church (as I relate later), without a thought. I would relish a face to face confrontation with members of this evil religion, and have done on several recent occasions.
But the Cathars were in another, even more sinister league. They scared the shit out of me.
Because there was a woman involved.
I know a great deal about her today. At that time she was about eighteen years old, probably an Ipswich art school student – I assume on a foundation course. As a twelve -year-old boy, she horrified me.
I can’t describe in words what that fear felt like. I can only feel it. So when this recovered memory first came up, I wasn’t expecting a woman to feature. I thought abuse was all down to male perverts. I suddenly gasped out, ‘Shit! There’s a woman involved.’
I could see her shadowy, malevolent, figure hovering in a curtained-off, dark doorway of the Old Curiosity Shop. She pulled the drape aside and fear suddenly shot up my left leg like an electric shock and left me gasping for breath, saying ‘No more! No more!’
Regaining my courage, I lay back, took a deep breath, and tried to continue, saying to myself, ‘Okay, what happened next? What did she do?’
But there was nothing.
The spell was broken.
It was like the Muse was saying to me, ‘Now you know what you’re dealing with and why you had to erase all memory of the Cathars in order to survive.’
By now, I felt I had honoured the Muse by hiring a detective, and there was nothing left to do.
But in fact, that huge fear was still left to deal with.
Convincing myselfI was ‘off the hook’, I decided to take Kevin O’Neill’s advice and walk away from it.
So I rang another member of the Cathars and told him my ‘researches’ were complete and I had decided to move on.
I was still talking in code to some of them. I was still supposedly writing my book of cosy nostalgic memories of Ipswich which had focussed mysteriously and ludicrously on The Old Curiosity Shop. But we both knew that was a lie.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked fearfully.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
I can still hear his sigh of relief from the other end of the phone.
And that was the end of it.
Only the fear remained.
So how did I resolve it?
Firstly, by writing the terror out of my system. Turning lead into gold, because undoubtedly the Cathars made for great villains. So she appeared as the villain Prussian Blue in Defoe. Optional visual
She is also the basis for Claudia Vampire Knight – a six-volume French series where Ipswich is thinly disguised as Gippeswick, its original name. My French colleagues sensed she was a villain supreme. They sensed she was real. Who needs Vampirella when the writer has met the real thing? She was so popular with our Goth readers that we even had a heavily tattooed resident Claudia model for publicity.
Currently, only volume one of Claudia is available in English, but I hope we sell enough copies soon for more volumes to appear.
And I wrote the Doctor Who audio play The Scapegoat, which explores the ritual that I knew I had been a part of.
And still the fear remained.
I was still haunted by her.
She had become a kind of dark Anti-Muse.
So, two years later, this time with a female friend, I took another pass at the Cathars.
It confirmed they were still ‘active’ as an esoteric group, which was disturbing, but there was no hard evidence, so I couldn’t see a way forward.
I’m being deliberately vague about the details of what we learnt for obvious reasons.
When anyone is haunted or otherwise disturbed by someone or something and direct confrontation is not possible, there’s another solution which makes psychological as well as magical sense. In fact, they’re pretty much the same thing.
It’s to heal like with like.
A kind of magical correspondence.
To take the original, which in this case is an anti-life cult of the Shadow Religion, inspired by Crowley and freemasonry, and heal it with something positive, wholesome and life-affirming.
So I got myself invited, via a friend, to a Passover ceremony – at the Saatchi and Saatchi synagogue, no less.
It worked.
I’d love to say more. I would love to relate the how and the why of a very positive experience. But it’s not a good idea, for all sorts of obvious reasons.
Just let me say I thoroughly enjoyed the ceremony, the truly excellent company, and am very grateful to my friend for her support.
I thought that was the end of it. And it was.
For several years.
Then the memories came back again.
That’s how powerful the impact was of what the Cathars did to that twelve-year-old boy. Reflecting on it today, I strongly believe revenge and direct physical confrontation is always the best solution.
As I’ve said, the Muse does not believe in forgiveness. Or forgetting.
When revenge, or justice if that word makes you feel more comfortable, is not possible, healing like with like is a slow burn alternative.
The intervention of the private detective was a form of revenge, but it just didn’t go far enough. Perhaps if the manager of the Old Curiosity Shop had met me in his local pub and we’d had a ‘bit of a chat’, it might have been different. I’d attempted a confrontation, but clearly not hard enough. Similarly, the Passover correspondence was valuable, but it was not a long-lasting ‘cure’.
In crude terms, the practitioner has to make a huge effort for the Muse to validate it, to know they’re really serious. It’s got to cost. Clearly, it hadn’t cost me enough personally. I was directing other people to act on my behalf. In psychological terms, they might say there has to be a physical acting out for the subconscious to know what you’re doing is real.
I’ll stick with the Muse.
So a year later, I found myself another opportunity for a magical correspondence. The Muse absolutely insisted on it and she made sure it happened at the correct time as Muses do. The time of the Passover.
I took an internal flight from Eilat to Tel Aviv for a consultation with an excellent rabbinical healer.
I can certainly say it cost me, financially, of course, but also as a physical ‘pilgrimage’. It started with the beginning of my morning flight where the security was not going to allow me on the aircraft. No way. She was not happy that I was using my Irish passport when I lived in England. I could hardly tell her I couldn’t use my English passport because it had an Iranian stamp in it, showing I’d spent three happy months in Tehran with my Iranian friends. So we argued endlessly, she consulted her boss and she wasn’t convinced either of my story of being a proud Irishman who just happened to live in England. I wasn’t convinced, myself. Eventually, they rang my rabbinical friend in Tel Aviv, he vouched for me and they let me on the plane, just minutes before it was due to take off.
I met my friend in his house in a Tel Aviv suburb and he and his wife were right in the throes of preparing for Passover. ‘Thoroughly cleaning their kitchen to remove all traces of chametz, leavening products, following the instructions in the Torah.’
It was Purification Time.
They looked really harassed and were obviously running late on their schedule. I just remember reams of polythene spread out over all the surfaces in the kitchen. But I pleaded with him to take time out to take me to the nearby rabbinical healer which he graciously did. There was just time for a great consultation, then a rushed taxi back to Tel Aviv and a night flight return to Eilat.
This time the magical correspondence really worked. Because it had really cost me to deal with the Pure Ones. That was seventeen years ago, and I’ve had no more nightmares about the Cathars since. The Catharsis is complete
I believe the Muse would have preferred revenge, but I remind her we’re not living in the Bronze Age.
How that might work you can see in my story of the Bronze Age avenging demi-Goddess SHA, who comes to the modern city of New Eden on a mission to execute the followers of the patriarchy responsible for a witch burning. It will be on sale shortly after we have fulfilled the pledges of our successful Kickstarter campaign, some time in the spring. The protagonist is a red-haired police detective called Duffy, which happens to be my mother’s maiden name.
That still left me with the legacy of other exponents of the Shadow Religion that I had come up against between the ages of five and sixteen. They represented ‘The Perils of Patrick Part Two’.
Like I said previously, I had a dangerous, deadly, but lively childhood. For which I have no regrets and want no sympathy.
Without getting into the esoteric, it was meant to be.
It’s also provided me with more than enough content to provide the raw material for a dozen graphic novels, as you’ll see if you look through my back catalogue.
But with those other exponents of the Shadow Religion: the child abusing, secret, inner circle of the patriarchal Catholic Church, there was always the question that everyone is still baffled by today.
Why are there so many Catholic priest abusers?
More than any other religion or any other organisation. We have seen an epidemic revealed of endless predation across the decades and I believe Catholic priests are secretly still abusing children, bearing in mind the thirty year rule. Namely, that it usually takes thirty years for Survivors to recover their memories of the crimes committed against them by clerics. Thus I’ve noticed on my Survivor website an increase in testimonies of abuse committed by clerics in the 1990s and early 2000s. I’ve no idea how priest abusers operate today and how they escape justice, but I believe they cannot help themselves, they are driven by a strong imperative to harm children. It will only be around 2055 that anyone can legitimately say, if the figures show a major drop, that the Church has reformed.
Meanwhile, what is the explanation for so many accounts of Catholic priests violating young boys across the world? Celibacy is the pathetic excuse provided by the loyal opposition (such a Richard Sipe). It’s nonsense. If you regret celibacy, why not find a suitable fellow priest or have a secret girlfriend? Why this obsession with young boys? No, I’ve always known it had to be something deeper, something more profound.
And in December last year I got the answer.
At least you have managed to capitalize from terror to some extent with your back catalogue Pat. Women Pedo's are the worst, very scary monsters indeed.....